Mullane Literary Associates

The Maeve Chronicles by Elizabeth Cunningham

Praise for Elizabeth Cunningham’s The Maeve Chronicles

“Cunningham, always excellent when detailing bloody battles and earthy sex, exercises well her skills with description, history, and myth in and out of the Bible, character, poetry, and song. With Red-Robed Priestess, Cunningham, a storyteller as crafty as J.K. Rowling, ends the Maeve Chronicles befittingly and beautifully, with a fourth novel as fully fruited as the first.”

Publisher’s Weekly (Red-Robed Priestess)

“Smart and earthy…richly imaginative…the epitome of the storytellers art.”

St Louis Dispatch (Magdalen Rising)

“Magdalen fans are in for more surprises in Cunningham’s classy, sexy novel...this will be snapped up by Magdalen fans as well as Celtophiles, feminists, and lovers of a good yarn.”

Booklist, starred review (The Passion of Mary Magdalen)

“Gleefully iconoclastic!”

Kirkus (Bright Dark Madonna)

Magdalen Rising

Born to eight warrior witches on an isle in the Celtic Otherworld, Maeve meets her match at druid school in Esus (Jesus), a charismatic foreign exchange student from Galilee. In a breathless tale that includes incest, rape, betrayal and defiance, Maeve saves Jesus from being made a sacrifice at great cost to herself. After she gives birth to a daughter, she is exiled, put to sea in a boat without oar or sail.

The Passion of Mary Magdalen

We next find Maeve naked on a slave block in the heart of the Roman forum where she is snatched up by an aristocratic madam. After adventures in the imperial city, which include intrigue at the Temple of Whores and Adulterers that nearly gets her killed, Maeve wins her freedom and goes to Galilee where she opens her own holy whore house, the site of her reunion with her long-lost beloved. In her highly unorthodox way, she shares his ministry and braves the mysteries of death and resurrection.

Bright Dark Madonna

Pregnant with her lover’s posthumous child, Maeve becomes a mother on the lam (with the Virgin Mary in tow) when the early church fathers decide she is not fit to raise the savior’s scion. Maeve’s adventures take her from the wilds of Galatia (where she raises her daughter Sarah till she runs away after a disastrous encounter with St. Paul) to the sophisticated port city of Ephesus where Maeve is reunited with her Sarah—a lesbian pirate. The pair goes on to create their enduring legends in Southern France.

Red-Robed Priestess

Maeve comes full circle, returning to Britain, with Sarah her daughter, to seek her first daughter, who has grown up to be none other than the rebel Queen Boudica. Maeve’s final adventure is further complicated by an impulsive love affair with the man who turns out to be General Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, the newly appointed governor of Roman Britain. The woman who has been to the foot of the cross must now bear witness to one of the most tragic battles of all time.

About the Author

Elizabeth Cunningham is the direct descendant of nine generations of Episcopal priests. Growing up hearing rich (sometimes terrifying) liturgical and biblical language, when she was not in church or school, she read fairytales and fantasy novels, and wandered in the enchanted wood of an abandoned estate next door to the rectory, experiences that together continue to inform her work. After being altogether too good and studious during her earliest years, Cunningham was expelled from a progressive boarding school for nudity and subsequently attended The College of General Studies at Boston University and Harvard-Radcliffe College, from which she graduated with a degree in English and American language and literature. In addition to the Maeve Chronicles, Cunningham is the author of the novels The Return of the Goddess, The Wild Mother, and How to Spin Gold, as well as two collections of poetry: Small Bird and Wild Mercy. After graduating in 1997 from The New Seminary, she was ordained as an interfaith minister and counselor. The mother of grown children, Cunningham now lives with her husband in the Hudson Valley.

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